


Dream The Open Door

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Dystopia, M/M, Poetry, richard siken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-21
Updated: 2011-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-15 20:41:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man is having a dream in which he does not remember his own name, but only a man whose eyes are bluer than blue.</p><p>From this Richard Siken quote: <em>oh the things we invent when we are scared / and want to be rescued</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream The Open Door

**Author's Note:**

> For blackeyedgirl, on her birthday. (Or a little bit after.)

What he imagines is always a door in darkness, and it's been raining, and he's cold and on the subway the eyes of people who may or may not have recognised him seemed heavy on his face. He has spent the long journey across the city staring at his feet and the dirty floor, its footprints. He is dressed like a tramp and that is probably why the people on the subway who, even though they are on the subway, are in suits that hardly make a sound and shoes that gleam and are carrying purses and briefcases and messenger bags that may or may not be full of money earned or inherited. He is carrying nothing but the glow of his fear, held in cupped hands, burning the skin of his palms.

Eventually the train halts and, at the end of its line, he gets up, gets off. It's still raining, the street is soaked black. His footprints exist for a moment, bubbling around his heels and reaching for him as he pulls away, then washed down. He holds his invisibility close, throwing it up from his hands into his face. The sparks from his fear (not extinguished in the rain, still glowing) catch in his eyes but he blinks them away. He walks, and the rain makes him feel that the road will never end, but at the end there is a tall building covered in cloud, and at the top of the tower, there is a door.

The door of the man whose eyes are bluer than the billboard he kept on passing each time the subway stopped, advertising a place or a time or a life than is bluer than the one that is to be had under the earth of this city, that door is closed. He stands there a long time talking himself into ringing the bell, striking his battered knuckles against the plywood, feeling the reality of his secret, now not so secret, clatter under the weight.

So he knocks. _Clatter. Boom._ He expects the wood to crumble before his eyes. He expects the wood to disappear and open on a dark space, a hollowness: he doesn't live here anymore.

What actually happens is the appearance of a floating voice, a blue voice, through the door but sounding like its owner is standing right _there_ , and its tendrils curling into his ear. He puts his ear to the door, and waits for the voice to come again. It does, and when it does sounds impatient, like its owner had just decided to give up on the day and go finally to bed, to sleep; his rest both longed for and felt like a defeat -- nothing about this day to make it any different from the last.

He says the name, whispers it at first, and hears his whisper given back to him by the wood of the door; then clears his throat and speaks, decisively, or as decisively as he can manage. He says, Sam, it's me. Since he has more or less forgotten his own name 'me' is the best he can do at identification; he knows there is a 'me', that his form has being outside his own perception of the rainy streets and the heavy-eyed people and his own hunger and the miserable dampness around his ankles, even if he has no idea what that being is anymore. He thinks -- believes -- that the man with the blue eyes (sam) will remember.

He doesn't give any evidence of it, not at first. He opens the door impatiently, one-handed, rubbing the results of a yawn out of his eyes. He looks tired of the whole game and not in the mood for aimless strangers who must have wandered up the stairs to his apartment door by some unhappy kind of accident, and nothing to do with him.

The other thinks: the blue of his eyes? is it still the same as I remember it? The rest of him hasn't faded -- his shoulders still broad and sharp and anxious, held up straight as though there is someone behind him with a stick, prodding him to consider his posture; his body still lean and boyish, or boyish, at any rate, for a man who is now well on his way to fifty; his hair is still black, and only the stubble on his chin is showing any grey.

But what about his eyes?

He looks up, in the middle of a cough, still looking more annoyed than anything else, and, then, his eyes.

The man who knocked on the door with hands that were shivering with cold over the knuckles and blistered with heat in his palms, finds himself freezing again. Still blue. Like a sky that neither of them have seen in this city for years; the sky that can only be seen on one's back, lying on grass with your feet in the soil, and your hand closed in the hand of someone you think you love. As blue, in short, as he remembered.

The other says a name, and the man who knocked thinks he ought to recognise it; thinks it ought to mean something to him.

Toby

the name is

Toby?

reverberating somewhere under that left rib where something that doesn't feel like fear is glowing

Toby! My _god_ , man, what the hell?

a name he does not quite remember

What the hell are you doing here?

or does not want to remember

Toby?

He looks up. He realises that he has had his hands in his pockets throughout this exchange in which nothing has been exchanged and take them out again, worried, slightly, that the man with the blue eyes (Sam) will think him rude. Or that he doesn't care. Or that he remembers. That really he remembers everything.

Toby? Come in.

The man -- _Sam's_ \-- hand is on his arm. It feels warm in a way that the man doesn't think can possibly be real, but just a wish he is making, unthinking. Sam pulls at him, gently, drawing him in through the door. Then Sam's other arm around his shoulders. Then the door closes, and he doesn't remember anymore.

*

"That's all? That I just take you in from the storm?"

"I think if you really consider it that is more than a little something, Sam."

Sam shrugs. Shrugs his mouth. Around the edge of his lips are tiny bruises, so small that only a lover could see them; the change in the hue and saturation of the blood suffusing his skin so slight that it would take a lover's instinct for physiological cataloguing to note the difference. Toby notices because of that and because he make the marks himself, and he likes to keep a track of his handiwork.

"I guess. I mean ... I didn't think it would be something that -- "

"Yeah, but," Toby says, "This is _my_ fantasy."

"But you know that I would -- "

He looks puzzled, almost offended with the idea that Toby's subconscious would give any credence to the idea that Sam would ever turn Toby away from his door. He is twisted in the bed, propped on an elbow. His chest takes the curve unnaturally, and Toby feels a momentary impulse to press his fingers over the centre line of Sam's breast, make sure of its solidity, the safety of the contents within. A fear, briefly -- something inexplicable, illogical.

"Yeah," he says, "Well, maybe I do."

"You do _now_."

"You haven't always been so solicitous."

"That was different."

The curve seems to be growing, the torsion unbearable, the likelihood that the shadow falling over Sam's chest will break into a crack, a chasm, seems greater but, still half in his dream, Toby can't reach out -- can't use his own fingers to push the sides together, or the strength in his arms to hold the break shut, or the weight of his own body to keep it from cracking open again.

"Toby, what the hell?"

"What?"

Sam sits up further; the shadow disappears as he flicks the lamp on the bedside table on. Toby gives out a very little sigh. Sam puts his glasses on: we're settling this thing now, dammit.

"In our relationship, which one of us is the anxious, devoted, hopelessly infatuated one?"

"Am I supposed to say that it's you?"

"You know it is me, Toby!"

"Well, okay. But I haven't seen a lot of evidence of any of those traits lately."

"Toby!"

"You're just trying to score points off my subconscious turmoil and you know it."

"Really I'm not. I'm not sure I would even know how to do that."

"Well, you'd pretty much do exactly what you're doing now."

"So I'm not, in fact, devoted to you and in constant anguish that you'll decide that this whole thing where you sleep with men and particularly where you sleep with me will one morning be brushed off like so much trash, but I am also a scheming Machiavellian gameplayer?"

"That sums it up nicely, yes."

" _Toby_!"

"And anyway, I'm not allowed to be ... any of those things you mentioned?"

"When was the last time you were _any_ of those things?"

"I think you'd be surprised, Sam."

"I'm guessing I would be. But I'm also guessing that I wouldn't believe a word that came out of your mouth."

"Well that's your misfortune, isn't it?"

"You ... hang on. You ... worry about -- "

"About a recurrence of the time when you wouldn't take my calls, respond in any way to the idea that we see each other, or indeed even pass me the time of day? Yes."

"Toby."

"Will you stop saying my name like that, it's disquieting."

"I thought you'd forgotten it, anyway."

"Trust me, Sam, I'm in no danger of forgetting who am."

"On account of the self-loathing."

"Yes. Quite right."

"You understand that your subconscious doesn't know shit, right?"

"Not eloquent, but on the way to reassuring."

"The point stands. And I thought you'd prefer the profanity to -- "

"To what you're bursting to say even as I do this -- "

 _This_ is Toby folding his hand gently over Sam's mouth.

"Yes," Toby says, "I know."He takes his hand away slowly, strokes the places where Sam's stubble is turning grey. "Me too." He grips Sam's chin, shakes his head a little from side to side, like a dog pulling on a stick held in its master's hand. He pulls at Sam's shoulders. He, finally, pushes his hands, the knuckles, the tips of his fingers, into the places he has feared broken; that he has thought he had smashed himself many times; that he has wanted to smash many times, since beautiful things are only made to be destroyed.

Still whole, just about.

Sam, baffled to the blue of his eyes, says, "Toby, what the hell?" again.

Toby looks at him, then looks away. The art of being able to hold the eyes of someone he is in love with for longer than five seconds a time is still one which eludes him. And, with Sam, a whole conversation could take place within that time. Toby can't help but find that unsettling. That he suspects that Sam thinks of it as an advantage their relationship has over some of the other beleaguered excuses for love affairs he has had in the past isn't helping.

Toby clears his throat and realises that he has hold of Sam's upper thigh, and that his fingers have made bright white marks in Sam's skin. While he approves of this (being old-fashioned and given to an old-fashioned man's appreciation of marks of ownership), he also thinks he'd better stop before he unintentionally creates a tourniquet. He takes his hand away, as though Sam's skin has suddenly become unbearably hot.

Sam clears his throat now and then says, "Er, thanks."

"Sorry."

"See, now I know something's up."

"What?"

"I can count your apologies on one hand, Toby."

"I think you'll find you're exaggerating for comic effect, Sam."

"Can you just get back to the thing? I'm getting worried now."

"You were the one who -- "

"Yes, yes, okay! I'm sorry. Carry on, please."

Toby clears his throat again. He has no idea how to say: sometimes I worry that you are going to crumble into glass in my hands, not because of your fragility but because of my inability to be the kind of person who says things like this; sometimes I'm terrified of you and as far as my history goes than must mean that you are in some way important, that you can grab hold of the threads of appalling doubt that curl up in my chest and draw them out and spin them, measure them, and cut them when you see fit; sometimes your body is still all I can think of, the planes and curves of it, the movement of the muscle under your skin, your teeth through your lips, the stupidly blue blue of your eyes.

He clears his throat again and ignores the eyebrow that Sam lifts in response.

"Sometimes ... I worry."

"Uh huh."

"I worry."

"You worry?"

"Yes."

"You worry about me? About ... this? Us?"

Toby mutters something that might be _oh for crying out loud_ under his breath, even he isn't sure.

"I can't say that I don't sleep because I'm too busy worrying about whether you leave or decide that your life would be immeasurably improved by not having me in it anymore or get torn down by a bus at the fucking lights one night when you aren't watching the road because someone who wasn't me called you on your fucking Blackberry. I can't say that I don't sleep; obviously, I do. But I dream. I think. I obsess. I engage in the building of scenarios that the sane part of my brain wishes I wouldn't. I worry, okay?"

Sam smiles, just faintly. "Yes. Okay."

"So don't walk under any buses, okay?"

Sam nods, a little boy with hair falling into his eyes. "Okay."

"And do your best not to notice that I'm an appalling ... " Toby clears his throat again.

Sam smiles, broader this time. "Partner? Lover? Boyfriend?"

"I hate each of those words."

"Yes, I know you do."

"Just try to forget that ... Just don't think too much, all right? In fact just forget the whole damn thing."

Sam nods again. A serious face; a boy in search of the approval he craves. "Okay."

"And stop saying 'okay'."

"Okay."

"Jesus, this is so exactly like being married."

Sam grins.

Toby continues, "To a vaudeville act."

"Hey!"

Toby grins. "Can we seriously forget we ever had this conversation and just, you know?"

"Fuck ourselves stupid?"

"I wasn't necessarily going there."

"Yeah."

"I wasn't!"

"Yeah."

The argument continues. They decide to take it to the bedroom, after which Sam makes it clear that he thinks that the resurgence of Toby's animal instincts means that he has won the argument, until Toby decides that animal instincts mean that he can cheat and reduce Sam to wordlessness, which he does.

Later still, with Sam's head pushed uncomfortably into his shoulder and Sam's hand on his belly, he finds himself saying,

"Do you ever think it shouldn't be like this?"

Sam yawns, like a cat bored of its lunch and shifts his weight in the bed, pushing up closer.

"Like what? You mean successful? Agreeable? Heaven forbid, happy?"

"No, just. This. This shouldn't work, but."

Sam shrugs, kisses the side of Toby's chest. "Maybe, you know, in some other universe, it didn't and we were incredibly unhappy, and only saw each other once a year, and fucked in our cars underneath broken streetlights or in the restrooms of bars in deserted towns. Maybe."

"Maybe."

"Maybe, you know, your subconscious thinks it's there instead of here."

"Sam, I barely believe in one subconscious let alone parallel universes of subconsciousnesses. Or whatever." He coughs, embarrassed by where that sentence ended up.

"You know, most physicists agree that parallel universes exist, Toby."

"Have you been reading _New Scientist_ again?"

"There was a copy in the library."

Toby sighs. "I maintain that it's bad for your health. Or mine."

"Anyway, shut the hell up. It works. Maybe we took a left when the universe thought we should have gone right. So what? I think that means we win."

"I win you?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

"I can go to sleep now? The metaphysics is over?"

"You were asleep ten minutes ago."

Toby reaches for the heaviness of Sam's head. His fingers smear in the sweat on Sam's brow. He tests the weight of Sam's head in his hand, like a baseball, like a leadweight of fear, glowing in his palm. The heat of Sam's forehead burns his skin. Toby leans over, pulling some underused muscle in his side in the process, and kisses Sam's crown.

As he falls asleep himself, he hears a voice that can only be Sam's say, "Dream the open door, Toby."


End file.
